Hi,
I’m baking some textures in cycles renderer in blender atm, and im seeing that it only uses about 50-65% of my cpu, wich is a i7 3770k.
Rendering on GPU for me is not an option, i have a amd card (wich i regret buying now both when it comes to hardware and drivers)
Any ideas on how i can make cycles use 100% of my cpu for baking? It is already terribly slow… just baking a coffee cup with 300 samples takes like a half an hour to bake, for one image…
Hi, it really depends on your image resolution.
Simple scene with 1K texture need 30 seconds on my i5 but for 4K I stop testing after a few minutes.
Cycles should use all cores most of the times but at the end it is not at full load.
But Cycles is still much slower than internal engine, I fear.
EDIT: I ask the developer Dalai Felinto of Cycles bake:
<dfelinto> mib2berlin_ghost: it’s actually: (1) prepare meshes; (2) cycles bake; (3) convert normals; (4) write image
<dfelinto> 2 and 4 (sometimes) are the only Multi Threaded parts.
So it is not much to do make baking faster.
Cheers, mib
If there is no competition for the CPU resource, and some process wants to use it … any operating system will give that process as much of the resource as it can use. But, that might well not turn out to be “100%.” For example, time spent reading from or writing to a file … or doing any sort of I/O at all … is time spent in a voluntary wait-state. And, if the machine is memory-constrained, time spent in virtual memory paging is an involuntary wait state. It sounds to me like your process is spending 50% of its time waiting for some reason.
ty for your reactions 
i have a samsung evo SSD and 16gb ram so i dont think the I/O or memory are much of a waiting thing here.
I guess i cant do much about it expcept for getting a nvidia gpu wich i consider now.
I think i forgot to mention i used the combined option to bake. I tried only the ambient occlusion and that goes pretty fast. and with about 75% cpu usage. when i bake glossy direct tho, it takes minutes per object.